Psychoanalytic Sociology

A New Theory of the Social Bond

Duane Rousselle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781350410206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Singularities are isolated social bonds. They lack a common language with one another and express themselves with certainty. Strangeness is therefore no longer constitutive to the social bond. It has become elevated to the very principle of social order. Our social world has become strange.
Duane Rousselle explores this new theory of the social bond while accounting for recent developments in the cultural logic of capitalism. Each chapter offers a different and compelling perspective on broader phenomena and notions of estrangement within civilization through explorations of the evil empire, rogue states, the master-slave dialectic, and the new status of knowledge that is at stake in the era of singularities.
This book offers enriched and novel dialogues across Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist and anarchist theory, and theoretical sociology with illustrative contemporary examples. Psychoanalytic Sociology argues that our current social crises are exemplified by the way social groups project their own inhumanity onto others. Written in Russia during the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis, it prophesied new uncompromising and aggressive wars, the confluence of 'foreign agent' laws and 'cancel culture.' The war among singularities runs very deep and exists on every scale (e.g., interpersonal, institutional, and cultural). This book navigates this strange new social world and invents a language capable of articulating it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Psychoanalytic Sociology
• First Intervention: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Qualitative Social Science Research Methodologies
• 1 What Does It Mean to Be Strange?
• Second Intervention: “You Are Not Having Milk!”
• 2 Uncanny Doubles
• Third Intervention: “Come on Baby, Let’s Do the False Twist”
• 3 Estrangement or Public Strangeness?
• 4 Sociology in Crisis
• Fourth Intervention: Psychoanalysis in Exile
• 5 Perverts, Monsters, and Postmodern Wisdom
• 6 Life and Death Strategies
• Fifth Intervention: The Lonely Anti-Racist
• 7 General War
• Sixth Intervention: From Canned Laughter to Can’t Laughter
• References
• Index
• Imprint